a printed page (#1079)

       Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly 
       translated into each other in that experience we call 
       con-sciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, 
       through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of 
       interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, 
       the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our 
       technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in 
       human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute 
       a single field of experience which demands that they become 
       collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private 
       senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes 
       _rational_ co-existence possible. As long as our technologies 
       were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact 
       that they were separate, closed systems was socially and 
       psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and 
       sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A 
       ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human 
       functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always 
       been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our 
       private senses or "wits," as they were once called.
                          --Marshall McLuhan, THE GUTENBERG GALAXY